Newsletter september

Our barrio is a desert. The earth splits in the heat and sun, and floods when the rain water cannot penetrate the rock hard soil. The land wasn’t always like this; in fact it takes only about 25 years for an area to transform into this. Twenty-five years ago a flood pushed thousands of people into Resistencia, the capital city of Chaco, from the surrounding areas of the providence. At one point 10 families per day were moving into the city seeking refuge as their entire lives were washed away with the flood waters, many were farmers. It is easier to build a homes in an area if you cut down everything first. Trees, flowers, animals were all sacrificed in this time of emergency to construct homes for this displaced population. Homes went up, people moved in and the uncovered earth dried up and died under the hot Chaco sun. Grass lawns do not exist in the barrio. Trees are few and far between. That lush green that invites us outside in our summers is not part of life in the barrio. Nature is so much more powerful and forgiving than we could ever be though. Change is possible.

Ofelia, my supervisor for the year, would spend her walks with eyes wide open. She would not be looking for dropped change on the sidewalks but rather trees which had taken root in the crack. These infant trees were pulled out gently, placed into a bag with water for travel in the bus, and that tree was the most important thing upon her arrival. Children, Elias, Alfredo, Adriana, would help her pick the perfect spot for that tree. They would use there imaginations to envision what that tree would grow up to be like. Many times that soil would break our shovels it was so hard. Days after many of these trees would get pulled out, stepped on, eaten by horses, and I grew frustrated, but I was reminded again and again of the power of hope and love as Ofelia would come walking up almost everything with a new tree, flower, or vine ready to replenish that soil. Ofelia never bought a plant; she just observed what the earth was offering her and used that to help others.

I get disillusioned often in searching for the cure all. I see poverty and I want to fix everything. I want to give them new roads, jobs, money, and when I can’t think of how to do it in that instant that is where I stop. We come from a society where everything is quick fix, and that is what we have grown accustomed to. We are a society that has the power to buy almost anything, any necessity at a whims notice. Hop in the car, drive to Wal-mart, home depot or well Wal-mart and everything is available. While this is an incredible power that we have, it is also a crutch. The problems we face today in our society, in the USA and worldwide are not problems that can be solved as quickly as just a trip to the closest mega store down the road. Patience is not easy, but those trees that Ofelia planted with those children matter. That is a very freeing notion to hold true. It means that your smile matters, every tree planted matters, every struggle, every pain, every victory matters. Anything that we have to offer, however insignificant to us, should be offered knowing that it truly will affect something, someone. In the face of so much darkness, any light which shines is important.

-james

August newsletter

In Argentina horses are just far more a part of daily life, even in a city. The poor find it cheaper to buy a horse and let it slowly decay from malnutrition eating from dumpsters, than to buy a car. Dona Cesi is a pie graph of almost every social problem that a society can produce wrapped up in one sick body. She is diabetic, to poor to buy nutritious food. She lives in the outskirts of town in a scrap wood and metal shack which she was brought to after either a flood or genetically engineered soy beans swept her away from her farmland. She is an uneducated, 40 year old woman in a society that infrequently offers work as underpaid cleaners to woman in her situation. And with a perpetually sick child Danny she is caught in and out of an inadequate hospital system. It was during her time of going to the hospital every day at 5 in the morning trying to get a place in line that someone stole her horse and only source of income. She would use the horse to pull a cart around a city at night collecting plastic bottles and cardboard to turn in for about 7 cents a pound. She came to us weeping, angry and restless. Not only did she have to worry about her sick child but now also about feeding her family without the job which prior provided enough to buy a carbohydrate loaded diet.
I immediately jumped straight to guilt after thinking of how cheap that 400 peso price tag sounded to my middle class, North American ears, $130 dollars. But before I could feel guilty for long an idea was thrown out that would teach me the true meaning of community. We were going to collect bottles for Doña Cesi and help her buy a new horse. And that night we started. We went around the slum with the kids from our community center and asked door to door for bottles. I am shameless and started the process “¿ Usted tiene algunas botellas, estamos juntando para poder comprar un caballo, alguien le robó el caballo a una señora de la iglesia?”. (Sir, do you have any bottles? We are trying to collect them for a woman that got her horse stolen). By the end of the night even the most shy of the boys was yelling out the question, running door to door. We repeated this process many nights, every time the children growing with enthusiasm. Six year old Elias started a bottle pile in his home to gather his collection, which he showed us with pride while visiting his home to drink mate. Many of us began to always carry bags with us and get off the bus a couple of stops early to collect bottles that many carelessly throw out as trash.
Mark in II Corinthians 12:10 says that “For when I am weak, then I am strong” and I think he was speaking of what lens you are looking through in your search for strength. I could have bought Doña Cesi that horse and it would have been over, my conscience cleared. I would have come back and been a martyr and role model of giving in many church’s eyes. But by participating in the struggle I was forced to only be as strong as the community was. I could only influence the outcome, I could not provide it, and I became powerless in my eyes. And in these moments the true strength of action was shown to me. This community was learning to work together to accomplish something, to help someone, something that would not have happened if I had been strong and powerful in the worlds’ eyes. Now the story of the horse and Dona Cesi was not only mine and my generosity, but rather of the entire community and the love and generosity of all that took action. Sometimes the only action that is I can provide is filling my bags with sticky bottles and dragging them to our collection, mine undistinguished from the others. I am continually learning to be a humble part of the community, in a world that has taught me to want credit for it all. A pat on the back feels good but a proud hug from someone joined with you in a struggle seems to pierce deeper.
Curiosity abounds,
-james

May 2008

There comes a moment when something finally makes sense, words that you have always just passed by, finally ring true and have meaning. I had seen and heard the phrase in one form or another all my life. You reap what you sow, where your treasure lies there your heart will lie also, countless forms and variations. I heard it again this week, different language and context, ¨Who do you work for?¨ It was a question my friend and supervisor Ofelia was always asked by a co-worker of hers when they would be discussing their jobs as social workers. Her friend would tell her, ¨If you´re working for the church, your employer, then fill your hours, take your check, leave work at work, be happy with having a job. But if you are working for the people, for the neighborhood, for change, then they are the ones you´ve got to be listening to. You have to be seeing what they need of you and when you need to be there for them, you need to be there¨.
This story has hit me on my many levels as I pull it into my life. Personally I am at a point in my path where I have to choose what I want out of life, what I value, and what I hold true. Who do I want to spend my life working for? I have derived that my greatest sin would be living for only myself, using my energy and mind for selfish gain. I want to help and I need to serve. It is difficult to consciencly enter into struggle and confusing. I know I offer no answer. Joining in though, I know I can at least offer my hands to collaborate and my heart to try to understand.
I look at these comments in my life with the church, and see just as stong a tie. A church that is seeking to fill pews will fill pews. This is what church an be and is for many, but what I want is to spend my days in the pew asking myself why I am there. I want to be asking myself who is this church in existance for. If it is for the people sitting aside me in the pews there will be the joy of knowing we are serving and caring for a few. But I feel that the church needs to be working for that neighborhood, wherever it may be, searching for struggle, searching out pain, helping, loving, bursting out those walls that have kept the church in for so long, using what we have to benifit others. Just as Jesus chose ordinary people for his disciples, his message continues to call us into action as we are, using the talents and life we have been given.
I get stuck up in it all much of the time, not knowing where to start, who to help, consumed with my own selfishness and greed. I know that if I feel it as an individual, we surely feel these emotions and stuggles as a whole. I feel comfort though in my own confusion, in our confusion, knowing that things can only change if we step out of our seemingly tranquil lives, and into that dischord. I want to spend my life living this question, always bringing it back to who and what I am living for. It calls us to put action to the gospel message, life to words, giving up what we have and understand, only to be confused and lost, but knowing that together we find our true significance. I want my treasure to be people and stories, I want what I sow to be listening and giving, and I want to work for so much more than money and the status quo.
Questioning it all,
james

April 2008

April is a journal filled with memories now. Things are happening here, inside me and the barrio. Energy that moves and produces scenes of whirling creativity and beauty. A start to the tale of April could be my birthday where I spent my 21st amongst sixty screaming children and surrounded by the people I have come to love so genuinely here. It was a quick celebration as sixty children in a small room with cake and soda is always a difficult force to contain, but the letters written by the friends I’ve made here will be carried with me as such powerful symbols of love and acceptance.
Shared poetry and music.
We send an entire day organizing a concert of a band we produce that day. La Paz we call ourselves. As the tale spins from 10 in the morning until the eventual concert at 4, the children create signs and banners displaying our name. As I learn anew everyday, the preparation of something is often more important than the event itself. We are presented shyly by a 14 year old who takes his role of announcer as seriously as possible. Oscar is his name. I on the guitar and vocals, giving ridiculous explanations of songs I clearly didn’t create. Victor, a 15 year old, laying down a rhythm on a drum set he created from scrap everything and anything. Alfredo, a ten year old, faking the best he can a bass beat on a nylon string guitar with the truest smile I have ever witnessed. It is the most rewarding concert of my life.
Sharing a meal made for 3, with 14 children, and it being enough. My greedy mind is always surprised by such happenings and demonstrations of selflessness.
A group and I go around the barrio drawing anything in nature that we find beautiful, in hopes of using the drawings for a future mural. Trees, plants, and animals are brilliantly represented using the simple medium of markers in that, one line can represent the world, style that children instinctually have.
An afternoon spent playing camp games in an international day of peace.
More shared poetry.
I spend a day planning a puppet show with a group of 6 year olds. A donkey, horse, and Minnie and Mickey, teach the other children watching, about the importance of telling your family where you are going when leaving the house. 100% produced by the children. It is a simple display of the creativity the mind of the young contain.
Leaf piles and walking the rest of the day with hair filled with little leaf memories of the joy that I have been a part of.
Teaching English to two little girls using the donkey puppet for no real reason at all, and listening to them respond in such funny accents as they pronounce their first English words.
Colonia, Uruguay becomes in my mind the land of Santo Lindo, an old Brazilian musician who teaches me the real soul of the blues, a top his improvised garbage can drum. He tells me of the power that music has, above skin color, creed, and race, as we drive down the narrow cobble stone streets in his 47 ford. The beauty of the fall back to earth, as we are launched into the air going over speed bumps, waiting for the next in the hope to hear that deep wild belly laugh of his. The word wonderful will forever be dedicated to you Santo Lindo.
Moments, beautiful moments in every corner of my life. Moments on beaches, in grass, in dirt, on porches. Feelings of floating with arms wrapped around pure sorrow searching for words I still haven’t found. My memories become color as friends here bring up the past which I am now a part of. I am surrounded by such positive energy here in my life and the gospel becomes action with that presence near by. I am fascinated with the idea of being able to improve one’s actions in this life. That I am wholly who I am, but that I have a power in what I am in the lives of other, positive or negative, and that we can use our time to improve the lives of others. I am influenced.
james

March 2008

“The poor are poor because they do not want to work and are lazy, what you are doing here is good and all, but it is sort of well, useless”. I hear this phrase said with all the certainty in the world, a fact in the mind of a upper middle class woman I speak with here. I remain quiet the rest of my time with her trying to think of a response to a phrase that speaks against everything I hold true. I dissect the phrase and find story upon story to try to change this woman’s incredibly distorted view.
I think of a mother breaking down in tears telling me how ugly a life it is without an education. Her parents never cared enough or were too busy to encourage her to study, so she never did. She tells me the only jobs she can get, are cleaning the floors and toilets of the rich. She has dedicated her life now to stop that cycle from consuming her children’s life. She is studying now along side her children in order to be able to help and push them to study. She does this on top of working two jobs a day, volunteering in the comedor passing out milk and bread, and having a six, nine, ten, and twelve year old to bring to and from school, do laundry for, cook and being a wife. How could this be called lazy?
I think of my supervisor Ofelia spending all day working with a boy to write the story of his life. After learning to use a computer and typing the story up, he brought it to his parents who didn’t give him the light of day, not a word of encouragement. What is that boy’s motivation to continue with school if no one ever tells him that what he is doing is good?
A pair of brothers has just started school again because of the positive influence that Ofelia has on their lives. They could only start participating in the workshops if they started up with school again. After a month of reminding them everyday to enroll, and telling them they were too smart to waste there time without going to school, they themselves started up again. The incredibly influential power a positive force has in someone’s life. Where I work is a positive force in the barrio. It is a place where children feel loved and special, where they are encouraged to dream the big dreams and where they are challenged to treat others with respect. It is a place where we focus on matching our words with our conduct. Our lips speak the world love while we show it with our actions.
It is a frustrating reality because small change in individual lives is not noticeable by a passerby, or someone who lives a kilometer away from the barrio. Instead of seeing a woman who works every minute of her life struggling to be able to provide her children with a better future than the one she inherited, they will see a tipped over dumpster in the middle of the street with men along side dogs picking through the waste. Instead of seeing a child that just dedicated his day to help clean and fix the inside of a church they will be bothered by that same child asking them for change on the street at night. It is a frustrating but necessary struggle to work toward change that affects people one by one. It is the gospel. The son of the creator of the universe wandered around and listened to people’s problems and ate in people’s homes to talk about them. While Jesus was the savior of all of creation he still healed people one by one.
The poor are not poor because they are lazy. There is poverty because we have forgotten that every man, woman, and child on this earth, we are to love as our family. We can not talk about poverty as if it is a separate entity from the world of the rich and privileged. There is exists incredible wealth in the world because there exists systems of oppression and injustice that provide wealth for a select few while dealing out pain, hunger and disease to the majority of the globe. The gospel defies this reality. It teaches us to love and to care, and struggle one with one for a tomorrow that is better and more just than today.
-james

February 2008

An afternoon somewhere in the past my supervisor and I sat down to do an evaluation of my time here so far, and my supervisor being the wonderful wise woman that she is, suggested we try and do some sort of artist demonstration to sum up everything we had talked about in the day. The program I am doing here has this wonderfully slow feel to it, where every step you take is so analyzed that every action in your life becomes so important and valued. There is something so beautiful about being aware of your life and your actions. I began to think about what this year has meant to me so far and what I would like the year to come to look like and I came to this conclusion. I don’t believe I ever before appreciated the interconnectedness of life; how every action affects the next, how every decision is really a decision for the next decision, with it never ending the time we have here.
To represent my life I drew my head with all this chaos behind it, not an ugly chaos, but a chaos of confusion and uncertainly. Everything in my life that I had learned and experienced everywhere, in every action I did, but never consciously guiding my actions. In front of me I drew what I hope to be the future, as I already feel is near in my recent present, colors focused, all of the chaos of my past and present, still complete, in that every color and line still existed, but centered. A sort of prism that sucks in light and spits out a rainbow. I have been thinking about this quite a bit lately as I read and find out more about poverty and underdevelopment in the world.
I had the opportunity to read “Open veins of Latin America” by Eduardo Galeano during the month of February, and have been fascinated by it ever since. It talks about the real and factual history and current exploitation in Latin America, which leads up to the current situation of some of the riches countries in the world in terms of natural resources having people dying of hunger. The prism in my mind is starting to put into focus my reality here, as I see hundreds of people living inside shacks of cardboard and scrap metal. The forces that drive thousands of hungry families from the farms and country to cities such as Resistencia, to make a living collecting bottles and cardboard in horse draw carriages at night. Poverty is not television program or commercial, it is a little girl I know coming up to us as we eat at a restaurant and confessing she is on the street every night until 6 in the morning selling Valentines Day cards, her sisters and her supporting the family on change. And as I understand more of the realities of the world we live in, I discover this remarkable web that covers our existence here.
It is scary to think that our actions affect so much more than ourselves. Every product we buy and use, every leader that we elect, every natural resource we decide to consume affects people on the other side of the world. This world is so injust, and for centuries this interconnectedness has been used for oppression and hurt, but we have the power to change that. Look at the interconnectedness of the church. I live in a city where over 80% of the population identifies themselves as a Christian, and I would bet another 10% identifies themselves with other religions. What a rallying point that is in itself; if we could only start living the beautiful messages religion around the world teaches us, how couldn’t we change this world?
My skewed vision that I saw the world with for so many years is being altered but as I become more and more critical of my own ways and the ways of my people I also find so much hope. I find hope in knowing so many movements of change have already been started and work. We cannot wait though for someone to place into our laps a handbook on how to live for change. It comes to the point where we can no longer wait to be informed of the problems of this world, we have to search and long for knowledge. That is where transformation and hope for a new tomorrow will come from. As I am connected to all of you, so now are you connected to every person and story I know, and I to your story. Through this stringing together of human lives we will span all humanity and carry each other towards a new understanding of what love and life can be. Steps over stumbling step we will walk together, uncertain and scared, but together.
Over the “less than half year remaining” hump, and so nervous and excited by that
-James

January 2008

A month away from my adopted reality here. January was spent covering Argentina with distinct purposes but all so rewarding. My first stop was to the province of Missiones in the northeast. Missiones is a very different atmosphere than mine here in El Chaco. Missiones is a lush mountain paradise, verging on rainforest, but not quite there. I’ve always been so curious about how the terrain here changes from arid flatland to banana trees, but my transition always occurs during the night on a bus so it may forever remain my mystery. My first voyage to Missiones was to translate for a group from Pennsylvania who came for a mission trip. My favorite experience, or better said, the experience that brought on the most change in my mental process, was a talk that I had with another volunteer and the pastor of the Pennsylvania church. We got onto the subject of former mission trips and the pastor got to talking of a trip member, a youth, if I remember correctly. The youth after hearing that an argentine church only needed 11,000 US dollars to be able to build and maintain a brand new building, returned to his congregation and rallied support for the project. The youth rallied so much support that the church in Pennsylvania was able to give the argentine church 100% of the funds needed to build the building, with some left over for maintenance in the following years. The story sounded like a dream come true to me, a new church, friendships over-seas formed, but then my friend, who is infinitely wiser than I, began telling the side of the story that she had heard. You see, less than a year after the new church was built, the membership had almost completely died in the sparkling new building. This puts a very different dimension of the giver-recipient model that we are taught and witness to in so many aspects of our lives in the United States. The church in Argentina was surviving and growing on the challenge and struggle of building a church without walls first, and then working to put a roof over their heads. If one person had a brick, they would bring it, another with the ability to lay it, and soon you have a wall. In the struggle relationships are built, and a church becomes a church, in a much deeper sense than a building with a sign hung. When the church was just given to the people the struggle was gone, and so was the integral formation of the church. They had a perfectly laid cement foundation to stand on, but with no real foundation to the membership. We get so sucked into the power of money in the United States, with it you can solve and help any problem it seems. Real power though, comes from loving and stepping into the problem with the people. I am stuck many times in my thinking because there are so many dimensions to every problem and solution. I offer no answers here; I only offer experiences that I’ve seen.
A return to Resistencia to wash clothing and rest for a day and then back to Missiones, this time with our youth group from my church. What a wonderful time of relaxation and play to develop relationships with the youth. Brilliant talks in a colossal circle discussing the eternal questions of the human condition. Real faith vs. being gullible. I pondered all of this while floating down the river, Brazil on the left, Argentina on my right, learning from the silence and power of water.
My vacation started on my return from Missiones, and I left for Buenos Aires to pick up my friend that came to visit me the following day. A 26 hour bus ride later and we were in Patagonia, the south of Argentina. I spent my days traveling place to place with all my life in a backpack, and when I had become comfortable with that, our backpacks were stolen and I was left with less. It made walking easier, and we eventually acquired new ones to facilitate the trip. I have never felt freer as I did as I sat on top a mountain staring off for miles at perfect lakes and tree covered islands. Life stopped in those moments. I learned to cook over a fire and live so much more simply. It seems I am always placed next to people that offer so much to my thoughts on life, and this trip was no different, with my friend always offering beautiful new thoughts on a life I constantly feel I have figured out.
I am safe and home now in Resistencia, but not for long. In the coming month I have a kids camp and then I am back again in Buenos Aires for a retreat with the other volunteers. Embracing being lost -james